Lean Configuration: Interactive 3D Configuration for E-Commerce Environments

In recent years, marketing of products via the Internet has become more and more important for both customers and manufacturers. Today, electronic shop systems enable people to select products from catalogues, gather further information and, finally, order and pay for the articles via a WWW browser. However, most products sold in this way are fixed and cannot be customised to satisfy the buyer’s requirements.Configuration functionality, as incorporated in current enterprise resource planning systems as well as industrial product development software, addresses the problem of fully automated design of products according to specification. However, such extensive functionality is difficult to implement, and requires extensive resources to run, and a large part of its most costly features offer no added value in an e-commerce context.E-commerce and the Internet in general present a number of specific requirements, i.e. lightweight, simple design; good scalability; interactivity; user friendliness; etc. In order to meet these demands, a new method of configuration has been developed. This method focuses on non-automatic, interactive, user-friendly configuration of product variants based on a simple yet flexible method in order to accommodate large numbers of users and a large variety of different products.This chapter presents configuration concepts developed in the INTELLECT project. INTELLECT, having started at the beginning of 2000, is currently nearing the completion of its development phase. The chapter closes with a description of the results envisaged and a description of the upcoming tasks.